Communication Theory

Media, Technology and Society

David Holmes

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781473903142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

`This is a very clear and concise summary of media studies, present and future. There is no other book that can both be used as a teaching tool and can help scholars organize their thinking about new media as this book can? - Steve Jones, University of Chicago

This book offers an introduction to communication theory that is appropriate to our post-broadcast, interactive, media environment. The author contrasts the `first media age? of broadcast with the `second media age? of interactivity.

Communication Theory argues that the different kinds of communication dynamics found in cyberspace demand a reassessment of the methodologies used to explore media, as well as new understandings of the concepts of interaction and community (virtual communities and broadcast communities).

The media are examined not simply in terms of content, but also in terms of medium and network forms. Holmes also explores the differences between analogue and digital cultures, and between cyberspace and virtual reality.

The book serves both as an upper level textbook for New Media courses and a good general guide to understanding the sociological complexities of the modern communications environment.

ONE

INTRODUCTION – A SECOND MEDIA AGE?

In the last few years … widespread talk of ‘cyberspace’ has brought new attention to the idea that media research should focus less on the messages and more on communication technologies as types of social environments. (Meyrowitz, 1999: 51)

In an essay, ‘Learning the Electronic Life’, written just before the ‘widespread talk of cyberspace’ that accompanied the so-called ‘Internet Revolution’ of the 1990s, James Schwoch and Mimi White (1992) set about to describe a typical day’s activity for their American family – from waking up, to putting in hours as teachers in the education sector, to trying to relax in the evening.

At first light they relate how they are woken by the baby monitor which links their room to their son’s. Next thing they are heating up the rice cereal in a microwave. While their boy is in the playpen, James and Mimi commence some exercise in front of the TV with remote control handy.

Out of the house and, if not a walk-to-work day, into the car, lowering the garage door with the automatic opener as we drive away on errands. Stop at the bank – or rather, the nearest automatic teller machine to get some cash for groceries and shopping (done with cash, checks, and credit cards, with access to the first electronically verified by a local computer network, the latter two verified at point of purchase by a national computer network) – and upon returning home, check the phone machine before going off to the office or upstairs to the study to work on the computer. A typical work day can include not only personally interacting with students and colleagues, but also interfacing with long distance telephone calls, photocopies, printouts, hard drives, programs, modems, electronic mail, floppies, audio and video tape, and once in a while a fax. If we do not work into the evening, a typical night may well include (along with returning phone calls) radio listening, recorded music (albums, tapes or compact discs), broadcast television, cable television, or videocassettes. The most probable result, of course, is some combination of the above choices, with too many TV nights degenerating into an uninspired channel-hopping via remote from the comfort of the couch. In the background the baby monitor provides the sound of sleeping baby, a sound that accompanies us into bed each evening. The cycle, with a slight degree of variation, begins anew the next day. (Schwoch and White, 1992: 101–2)

Schwoch and White describe these interactions as ‘an unremarkable series of events’ about which ‘few stop to marvel at how quickly and unthinkingly certain aspects of technology – telecommunications based on the electromagnetic spectrum and various wire-based telecommunications networks such as the telephone – become part of our everyday experiences’ (102). Their very prosaicness, they argue, is what makes them so important and powerful, because it is in our interface with these technologies, the human–technical interface, that an entire pedagogy of technical competence is fostered, a pedagogy which becomes almost buried in the thousands of discrete habits and routines that both help us, connect us and imprison us in the information society.¹

People who live in information societies not only encounter and ‘use’ information and communication technologies; rather, increasingly, their modes of action are enframed by these technologies. They are not so much tools as environments. Since Schwoch and White published their essay, over a silicon century (seven years) has passed, in which time a range of interactive communication technologies have come become meaningful in our daily life. We could add to their scenario the emergence of digital, optic-fibre and packet-switching technologies which have made the Internet possible, and the normalization of satellite-based communications and information devices like satellite phones and global positioning systems (see Dizzard, 2000). More often than not, we are not even aware of the extent to which these technical systems precondition the simplest of activities – an ignorance which was aptly epitomized by the trillion-dollar anxiety over the millennium bug, the dreaded Y2K.²

But this lack of awareness does not signal that we have become ‘overloaded’ with information, images or technology, as subscribers to the ‘saturation’ thesis suggest.³ Media saturation tends to encourage a view of some order of unmediated experience, which is menaced by impersonal scales of instrusive media. In this book, we will see that, in fact, attachment to media can be very personal and as meaningful as embodied relationships, and that appreciating the strength of these attachments requires a broadening of the concept of ‘cyberspace’.

The exponential explosion in webs of CITs (communication and information technologies) has, at a phenomenological level, shifted the orientation many of us have to ‘objects’ to an extent that can change our sense of otherness.⁴ As face-to-face relations are replaced by ‘interface’ with technological ‘terminals’ of communication, electronic devices acquire a life of their own. Outside our own bodies the world fills with objects that are also animated, an animation which might compete with the human – as suggested by Sherry Turkle’s notion of the computer screen as a ‘second self’ (Turkle, 1984). Whilst the non-human might be competing with the human, individuals themselves increasingly find that they are part of contexts in which they are ‘objectualized’.⁵ Studies that have been conducted on these phenomena show high degrees of attachment to media and communication technologies, whether this be people’s need to have a television on in the background even if they aren’t actually watching it, the near desperation that many Internet users have in downloading their email, or individuals who find security in having a mobile phone even if they use it only seldom.

But of course, behind our surface contact with this system of objects are definite social relationships, relationships which new communication and information technologies enable to be extended in time and space (see Sharp, 1993). At the same time, however, the particular way in which they are extended can also be considered a relationship itself, which is capable of acquiring an independence from the function of extending ‘pre-technological’ or pre-virtual relationships, even if they somehow might take different kinds of reference from these relationships.

What this book proposes is that these electronically extended relationships are constitutive of their own dynamics, dynamics which can be studied beyond the bewildering array of object technologies which, in their very visibility, render the social relation largely invisible.

In particular, the social dynamics that will be analysed on the basis that they can be analysed as part of this technologically extended sphere of social integration are broadcast integration and network integration. By the end of this volume, I aim to show that these kinds of integration are ontologically distinct – that is, distinct in external reality, not just theoretically distinct – whilst at the same time mutually constitutive.

Communication in cybercultures

The technologically constituted urban setting which Schwoch and White describe is increasingly typical of contexts of everyday life which preside in the processes of modern communication. Communication does not happen in a vacuum, nor does it happen in homogeneous contexts or simply by dint of the features of a natural language, but in architectural, urban, technically and socially shaped ways.

This book explores the interrelation between these contexts and the character of a range of communication events. It is about the contexts of communication in so-called ‘information’ societies as well as the kinds of connection that these contexts and the communications themselves make possible. The urban and micro-urban realities that can be described in the everyday experiences of James and Mimi are integral to the understanding of contemporary communication processes. Is there a relationship between the increase in the use of CITs and the increase in the number of people living alone in America, Australia and Britain? Is there a logic which links the privatization of public space like shopping malls and the dependence on broadcast and network mediums?

In the last ten years, the convergence between technologies of urban life and new communications technologies has been remarkable. It has even led some commentators to argue that the privatizing concentration of so many context-worlds, be they electronic, architectural or automobile-derived, is what really amounts to ‘cyberspace’. This convergence is perhaps nowhere more powerfully represented than it is by the Internet, which is itself a network as well as a model for ‘cyberspace’ relations.⁶

It was in the final decade of the twentieth century that the emergence of global interactive technologies, exemplified by the Internet, in the everyday sphere of advanced capitalist nations dramatically transformed the nature and scope of communication mediums. These transformations heralded the declaration of a ‘second media age’, which is seen as a departure from the dominance of broadcast forms of media such as newspapers, radio and television. Significantly, the heralding of a second media age is almost exclusively based on the rise of interactive media, most especially the Internet, rather than the decline of broadcast television. Empirically, some have pointed out how certain technological forms of mass broadcast have waned or fragmented in favour of ‘market-specific communication’ (see Marc, 2000), although this is seldom linked to the rise of extended interactive communication. Rather, what is significant for the second media age exponents is the rapid take-up of interactive forms of communication. Whether this take-up warrants the appellation of a second media age, which can so neatly signal the demise of a ‘first media age’, is contested in this book. Certainly, the second media age thesis points to and contains insights about definite changes in the media landscapes of nations and regions with high media density. But the conjunctive as much as the disjunctive relationships between old and new media are very important.

Nevertheless, the arrival of what is described as the ‘second media age’ has two important consequences: one practical and the other theoretical. The extent and complexity of these practical consequences, which this book outlines, concern the implications which ‘the second media age’ has for contemporary social integration. The theoretical consequence of the second media age is that it has necessitated a radical revision of the sociological significance of broadcast media as addressed by traditions of media studies.

The overstatement of linguistic perspectives on media

Under the influence of cultural studies, European traditions in media studies have, since the 1970s, typically focused on questions of content and representation rather than ‘form’ or ‘medium’. This is perhaps itself a reaction to the preoccupation which ‘process’ models developed in the United States had with ‘media effects’ and behavioural epistemologies.⁷

Analysing media content – the employment of perspectives on language, beginning with Marxist conceptualizations of ideology, followed by the influence of ‘semiotics’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘New Criticism’ – was conceived as a matter of studying the meaning of texts and discourse and the way in which the ‘mass’ media influence cultural values and individual consciousness. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, differences between these approaches to studying texts were debated around the problem of social reproduction and how dominant discourses of a ‘dominant ideology’ were related to broader social form.⁸ Under the umbrella of the linguistic paradigm, media studies has also concerned itself with ‘media’ over ‘medium’ – with the textuality of writing, still and moving images, music and speech – more than with the institutionalized adoption of these media in broadcast and network settings.⁹ Together with the related discipline of cultural studies, media studies has been a discipline which has invariably confined questions of identity (individuality and ‘the subject’) as well as questions of power, ideology and community to the great model of language and the frameworks of understanding that have derived from the influence of the ‘Copernican revolution’ in the humanities inaugurated by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the turn of the twentieth century (see Chapter 2).

With the exception of a few theorists writing throughout the period of the dominance of media studies such as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord and, to a certain extent, Jean Baudrillard, there was very little attention given to questions of form and medium.¹⁰ It was as though the fascination with the content of ‘the image’ and the discourses surrounding it had somehow concealed the very modes of connection which gave them circulation. Some areas of communication studies, in particular positivist and behaviourist perspectives,¹¹ have examined the interactive processes which are deemed to exist between two speakers – and dyadic models of communication analysing the relation of sender, receiver and message abound (see Chapter 2). However, the social implications of the actual structures of communication mediums (network and broadcast) have received relatively little attention (save exceptions such as the above).

From the early 1990s onwards, a few years after the Internet began its now infamous exponential growth, the theoretical necessity of analysing the social implications of communication ‘mediums’ had become paramount, if not unavoidable. It was as though, by the turn of a key, there had been a transformation in the opportunity to understand the integrative dimensions of media that aren’t subordinate simply to linguistic derivatives. It was as if media studies had been waiting for an historical object – the Internet – in order to acquire the appropriate lens for understanding communication as medium.¹²

The consequences of this theoretical period of change were that, firstly, some of the early ‘medium’ theorists like McLuhan and Innis began to be, and are still being, reclaimed (see Chapter 3). Secondly, new distinctions are being made to reflect the renewed importance of distinguishing between ‘form and content’ such as ‘ritual’ versus transmission accounts of communication. The understanding of communication as ‘ritual’ is a radical paradigm shift from the hegemonic status of ‘transmission’ views of communication, which all but saturated communication theory for the most part of the twentieth century. Put simply, ritual views of communication contend that individuals exchange understandings not out of self-interest nor for the accumulation of information but from a need for communion, commonality and fraternity (see Carey, 1989). Following this approach, transmission models of communication, on the other hand, view communication as an instrumental act – the sending and receiving of messages in ways which individual actors are largely in rational control of.

The latter model of communication, which has in the main dominated communication theory, has been critiqued, either implicitly or explicitly, by philosophers of language who have attacked the identitarian, essentialist, ‘logocentric’ and ‘phonocentric’ underpinnings of such a model (see Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan). The project of Jacques Derrida, for example, has been to criticize the idea that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction – A Second Media Age?
• 2 Theories of Broadcast Media
• 3 Theories of Cybersociety
• 4 The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication
• 5 Interaction versus Integration
• 6 Telecommunity
• References
• Index